danah boyd is one of my favorite writers on the intersection of media, culture, and youth. She recently posted a fascinating piece on how for teens, the same Facebook status update is meant to communicate very different things to different parts of the audience:
Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing.